The old Grand Trunk line is now 41 miles you can bike

Trains stopped running between Owosso and Ionia years ago, but the line they ran on is still doing work — just for people on foot and on bikes now. The Fred Meijer Clinton-Ionia-Shiawassee Trail follows about 41 miles of the old Central Michigan (Grand Trunk) railroad bed straight across mid-Michigan, and a good stretch of it belongs to Clinton County.

It threads the county’s railroad towns the way the trains once did: Ovid on the east, then St. Johns, then little Fowler to the west, before crossing into Ionia County past Pewamo. That’s no accident. These towns grew up because the railroad came through, lining their depots and grain elevators along the same corridor your feet are now on. The flat, gentle grade that made the route easy for locomotives makes it easy for a kid on a first two-wheeler.

Most of the trail is twelve feet of packed crushed limestone, smooth enough for a road bike, with about eight miles of asphalt where it runs through the towns. It’s built for walking, running, and biking — no motors, no horses. In St. Johns the trail slips right past town, so you can roll off it for a coffee or a mint ice cream and roll back on.

What’s nice is that it doesn’t dead-end at the county line. The eastern stretch links up with a whole chain of Fred Meijer trails — the Grand River Valley, Flat River Valley, and Heartland trails — that together stitch up something like 125 miles of former rail bed across this part of the state. Start at the St. Johns trailhead some Saturday morning and you could, in theory, keep pedaling west on old railroad ground nearly to Alma. Most people just go as far as the next town and turn around, which is plenty.